


The Salarian Suicide

by neolith



Series: The Dream Walking-Series [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Art, Canon-Typical Violence, Crime Fighting, Depression, M/M, MEBB2016, Minor Character Death, Murder Mystery, Needles, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect), Suicide Attempt, mild AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:07:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7346308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neolith/pseuds/neolith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mild AU where human biotics don't dream of their own, but rather enter other people's dreams. </p>
<p>Kaidan is a homicide investigator in Omega. One night he meets a war veteran in the dream of a Salarian about to be murdered. Then nothing is ever the same again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Salarian Suicide

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Big Bang ever as an author and woaah! It has been lots of fun and lots of stress! (Just had to have a super chaotic few months timing up perfectly with the whole MEBB!) I'm so happy I signed up though and have been blessed by [MrGamblinMan's incredibly beautiful art](http://mrgamblinman.tumblr.com/post/146699708850/my-piece-for-the-mebb-i-worked-with-and-helped). I am forever humbled! Do make sure to catch [MrGamblinMan](http://mrgamblinman.tumblr.com/post/146699708850/my-piece-for-the-mebb-i-worked-with-and-helped) over at Tumblr and show them your love and appreciation for the art!
> 
> A little about the story - I've imagined it to set in a world similar to the Mass Effect universe, but I have taken some freedoms to adapt it to the story. Since I love Omega, I wanted that setting, but gave it some law enforcement (loosely based on C-Sec, but like a grossly underfunded and understaffed C-Sec that is far more prone to corruption). Also taken some freedom with human biotics, greatly diminished the need for amplifiers. 
> 
> For detailed trigger warnings, check the end notes! (All these triggers are hinted at in the tags.)

 

 

 

 

Velocity was a curious thing. It could be fast, oh so fast, yet simultaneously slow the world down. When reaching beyond a certain limit, it contorted your perception of space around you, making details passing fast appear as one blurry image locked still in time. Velocity also possessed the power to contort perception of self. What had seemed a definite and justified end twisted into a shameful escape, a slight to those who never got to make that choice.

A blue light spread, subconsciously summoned, gripping and shielding at once, ripping at walls and wiring and bringing the shaft collapsing in on itself as though a vacuum had sucked it together, thick metal writhing to fill the sudden emptiness. A loud, scraping pitch echoed in all directions, trembling through multiple floors and jolting numerous slumbering heads into waking. Then silence spread like dust in the wake of a landslide. A shadow skulked away unseen as the alarms began blaring.

\---

In Omega there was always something wrong. Mostly it was hid away, but on occasion there was a dent in the infrastructure that even legal civilians couldn't escape to see. Kaidan was no great exception to the norm in his reaction to one of the station's largest commuting elevator being cut off. While he did not stop to gawk and gossip, he turned his head, taking in the scene in passing, then lost interest as the sign of the Shappi's Pub came into view. The entrance was small and inconspicuous, nothing about it attention-grabbing if you weren't already planning on heading there. Kaidan had never been before, but it had recently become the new favored pub for after works amongst his colleagues.

The place was nothing fancy, rather ratty in fact, but so was any bar or pub in Omega. A flickering holoscreen in the corner read the evening news cheerfully through the dulcet voice and shape of an Asari avatar. Local news was the usual humdrum of gang wars, missing people and gossip. On the galactic segment the avatar announced that the war was over, which perhaps ought to elicit cheers and excitement if there was any one definite war to finish, rather than thirty or so of them, and for every war ended, two or more new armed conflicts erupted. Saying a war had ended was about as significant as to say the regional boxing championships had ended. Exciting information alternatively a welcome break if you were directly involved, but otherwise just another soundbite lost in the noise. And give it a year and it would all start over again. As the avatar finished, it switched to advertisement with Terra Firma Corp Jack Harper challenging scientists to come work with him to pave out the future for humanity. From a company specializing in weapons and other battle equipment, that could mean a lot of things.

Kaidan was one of the lucky few who'd never seen the battle fronts, but he saw remnants of them well enough through work. An unsurprising many murders, considering how retired soldiers were dumped back into ordinary life like junk mail, were committed by veterans in fits of flashbacks. Those cases were often depressingly easy, seldom necessary to bring to court as the perpetrator commonly took their weapon to themselves once clarity returned to them. Crime and retribution locked in the same room. While closing a case always brought a sense of satisfaction, those cases mostly left a bitter taste in the mouth. With proper mental health care they could easily have been avoided.

"Stop thinking," Garrus said, propping a drink into Kaidan's hand in passing, heading over to a large, crowded table and sliding into the corner, spreading over the seat like a king. A few more of Kaidan's O-Sec colleagues where gathered there, chatting away about anything but work, mostly gossip, and laughing. Kaidan tried a small smile too, idling over to them while sniffing the contents of his glass. At least it wasn't Krogan this time.

On the way over, Kaidan let his eyes sweep over the room, taking in the filth together with whatever in it was still worth looking at and noticed a guy sitting alone by the opposite wall. The table he sat at was bigger than the three chairs around it suggested. It was a sad sight, like people had probably asked if the seat was taken, then moved the chair rather than sit down. The man was strangely handsome for being so abandoned, features sharp and a buzz cut that actually fit him. Only a fresh cut at his hairline marred his features. There was however a cloud of gloom hanging about him, that perhaps explained some of the distance created between him and any other patrons in the pub.

Kaidan was ready to leave his observation at that when the man looked up and their eyes met. The moment was neither magical, nor special, even if it would feel so later. Kaidan merely raised his glass in greeting and the man nodded. When Kaidan turned back to his colleagues he saw Traynor looking at him, smirking knowingly, nodding her head towards the stranger in encouragement. Taking a swallow of his drink, good old bland lager, Kaidan decided to go for it.

Only to be stopped by Miranda.

"We're the most sober ones of the lot, and there's a call," she explained, already leading way towards the exit. Maybe the man had heard, or maybe he simply understood anyway, because he gave this sad smile, raised his glass and embraced his solitude again. Kaidan wondered if this was perhaps not the first time someone stood the man up like this.

On their way out, the news channel was hijacked by ARIA, an anarchist voice on the intraweb who would "bestow the world with counter-propaganda," to voice it in her own words. She condemned Jack Harper, sharing footage of him meeting with well known human supremacists, calling him a puppet master and a commercial poison in the political world.

Miranda slammed the door a little extra hard behind them.

\---

The duo arrived to a fresh crime scene with a murdered child, a hysterical parent screaming from a room somewhere in the apartment where regular police tried to talk them down. The toddler-sized kid was Vorcha and therefore wouldn't have had a long life ahead of itself had it lived, and Kaidan couldn't decide whether or not that made it all the worse.

"Vorcha family with gang affiliation," Miranda muttered, annoyed, glaring down at the corpse as though it had personally offended her. "I don't need to talk to the screamer in the kitchen to know this was gang war retribution. We're wasted on this case."

It wasn't really a secret to anyone that Miranda valued her skills and training above the usual, straightforward homicide scenarios, preferring to only work on the intricate and often high profile cases. Still, Kaidan could never get over his sense of discomfort over her casual dismissal of the dead. It may be her way of coping, never getting attached and seeking efficiency with resources rather than investing in every little thing that crossed her path. Kaidan couldn't do that, was too human perhaps. He disliked working with Miranda for this very reason, as much as he was in awe of her competence otherwise.

"If it's so straight-forward then we can wrap it up fast," Kaidan said, volunteering himself for the interview with the parent to spare them Miranda's lack of sympathy. Explaining to relatives why they couldn't take the body, clean it up and give it a respectable burial already  was never pleasant, but Kaidan was at least decent at it. Within half an hour the parent was calm, accepting, moving past denial and into proper mourning.

Kaidan longed for that beer he'd had to leave behind.

\---

In the beginning, Kaidan remembered having been thrilled upon falling into another person's dream. Now, years down the road he was rather jaded, having seen everything from the most mundane to the scandalous and even bizarre. People had little or mostly no control of what they dreamt so it could derail quite a lot. Once you got a sample or two of it every night however it felt like nothing was new under the sun. Or the starlit sky, as it were.

This time around it was clearly a busy person, their dreamscape filled with an amount of clutter that only came from having too much on your mind. There were multiple little sections of the dream that blended together to a larger picture, and some corners were honestly random. Next to filing cabinets bursting with documents there was a section of sandy beach with waves washing in through a wall, washing up the fraying edges of a net, filled with dead fish - just to mention one example.

The dreamer, a seemingly neurotic and definitely naked Salarian, stood in front of a mirror, trying to put back scales that kept falling out, leaving the alien's skin looking raw and scraped. Kaidan had come to realize this was the Salarian version of humans dreaming of their teeth falling out, which was one of the more common formats to stress dreams.

There was something infinitely more interesting in the dream than the stressed out dreamer however. At first, it appeared to be a trick of the mind, but then the man looked to Kaidan, straight on, in a way that figments of the dreamer's imagination never did. It was the man from Shappi's, looking slightly weary at first, but then a gentle but genuine smile spread across his face.

"I haven't dreamt in months," the man said, sounding mildly amazed at the fact. "With my luck, I thought it'd be a nightmare for sure, but doesn't look like it."

The line could've sounded flirty, had it been delivered differently, but there was another tone to the man's voice, slightly rough as it was. His eyes were actively roaming over every little detail, quickly but methodically mapping out the area. The behavior spoke of experience of being in unfamiliar and unsafe spaces. Kaidan had seen it in colleagues on tactical forces and in soldiers. Considering how small O-sec were for such a large station, Kaidan assumed the later, unless the man was merely a tourist in these areas, which was unlikely. Omega was not a place for tourism, unless your tourism was a cover for shadier business and the man did not seem the sort. He postured too little and seemed too much a loner to work the black markets in any manner.

"I thought I knew every biotic in Omega," Kaidan tested his theory of the man, trying to sound casual, even though Miranda insisted it made him sound dull and boring. The man looked puzzled rather than bored though. He was silent for a while, just staring at Kaidan, then looked down at his hands as he activated a shield that covered his skin in the uneven, flickering layers of someone untrained. The glow spread further than Kaidan's did, but dreamscape had a tendency to skew everything, so it wasn't something worthy of attention. The apparent lack of training however was.

"So this is biotics?" the man asked, observing the glow with the same attention he'd scanned the dream. "I'd wondered what it was..."

"Yeah," Kaidan replied, activating a shield of his own, much more stable. "After using it, we're more likely to end up in someone's dream. You never realized there was a connection?"

"I thought it was because-," the man started, but stopped as something in the air shifted. The man must've recognized it because he instantly seized up with fear, then set off with an urgency that Kaidan didn't pick up from the dream.

"I must wake up," the man insisted, searching around as if looking for an exit. Kaidan only observed the man, trying to figure out what he was getting from the dream that Kaidan wasn't. "There are enemies at camp. We must go!"

The words were barely out when their attention was drawn, as if against their will, to the dreamer. Suddenly they stood close to the Salarian, looking over his shoulder at what looked like a bedroom door and the image sort of blended with the view of Kaidan's own, much more orderly bedroom and just before waking entirely, he saw a female human assailant come at him with a long electric blade.

Kaidan drew deep, panicked breaths, half surprised it didn't hurt because that last moment had been so visceral he'd thought the blade had actually gone into him. He'd seen multiple nightmares, but usually they weren't as real as this, the line between dream and waking much clearer.

Once his heart rate had calmed, his quick pants easing into comfortable breathing again, he contemplated going back to sleep, but there were too many thoughts rummaging about in his head, from the dream to the man who hadn't known he was a biotic. The thoughts struggled to come out on top, to be the one Kaidan focused on and it just made his head hurt so he went to the stuffy corner where he'd squeezed in an armchair in front of a small screen. Dropping into the seat, he searched around for a vid that caught his interest, but all the latest releases were either heroic war movies (obvious propaganda to get young people to enlist) or sappy romantic melodrama vids. In the end, romance seemed better than violence, and Kaidan ended up watching the latter half of some Quarian - Salarian coproduction with severely lacking production value. It still made him sense his solitude acutely, wishing not only for a couch, but for someone to fill it with him. He fell asleep before the end credits and woke up to his omni-tool calling him early to work. Another dead body, and this one much more complicated than the Vorcha child murder.

\---

People always perceived themselves a little differently than the rest of the world did, which went for Salarians as well even though they did tend to have slightly more grounded self image compared to other species. Upon entering the crime scene Kaidan thought himself to experience a moment of déjà vu, before he ultimately managed to place the Salarian as the past night's dreamer.

The Salarian sat still and cold just the way he'd been found, hunkered over with a blade through his stomach, hands in his lap as though they had dropped there from losing their grip on the blade's handle. There were severe electric burn marks, but the blade probably running low on battery by now only gave the occasional spark. It looked straight forward enough, a perfect arrangement meant to leave no doubts.

Miranda was there too, already filling out forms to clear the body for transportation to the nearest morgue. How long had she been here before contacting him, Kaidan wondered, looking around at the room that was stuffed enough to fill its own evidence room, if they were to bring everything in. If she was ready to send the body away, she must've been on location for hours already.

"He was under a lot of pressure," Miranda commented on the Salarian's life, and from what Kaidan had seen in the Salarian's dream, this came as no surprise. There were a considerable amount of documents scattered around that could probably shed some light on the exact cause of the pressure. Miranda might have been able to read herself to an indication of it without even touching any of the evidence. Kaidan tried to quickly skim the content of the nearest document, curious as to who could've pressured their victim.

"I thought Salarians were made of sturdier stuff, but I guess even the strongest break. I'm content with labeling this suicide and sending the body to the morgue already," Miranda concluded. She was ruthless, but never sloppy, so the quick dismissal caught Kaidan by surprise.

"Funny, because I'm convinced this is homicide," he protested, crossing his arms and locking eyes on his colleague. Miranda turned to him, not amused, quirking a perfectly picked brow in question, or perhaps provocation.

"Let me fill you in on a little you perhaps have missed, arriving late and all," she said, which was an unfair jab because Kaidan had come within thirty minutes of being called, which was perfectly acceptable time considering the distance between his place and the crime scene. He'd even skipped the shower and taken breakfast on the go to cut down the time.

"You could've called me sooner," he said in his defense, but was promptly ignored.

"O-Sec has patrolled this area all night, noticing nothing," Miranda went on. "Surveillance - nothing. Alarms - nothing, and this guy had _six_ of them, covering everything from doors to tiny vents. And the log shows that the entire apartment was locked down from the inside up until the concerned landlord made the override when the victim missed an appointment they'd made regarding months of unpaid rent. The landlord has a solid alibi, by the way, confirmed by witnesses _and_ surveillance. Unless the murderer was still in the apartment when the landlord arrived, there is no way there was anyone else in the apartment when the deceased died. And as you see, not much space to hide in here. It couldn't be homicide, no matter how many possible motives you can think up."

Kaidan drew a deep breath through his nose, casting his amber eyes about the room, searching for a secluded spot, but the place was tiny. Indeed, there was no place to hide in here, every little nook too small for anybody (even Volus or Hanar) to fit, and filled with random junk on top of that. Kaidan dragged Miranda outside instead, finding an isolated section around the corner upon a platform with ladders for emergency evacuation going both up and down.

"I dreamwalked last night and I was _in_ the Salarian's head as he was stabbed," he explained in hushed words. Miranda's face gave nothing away to tell how she took that, her eyes fixed and unmoving at him and her face blank and cold as it was when she was focused on the job. "I saw the assailant just before I woke and it was a human woman. I _know_ the Salarian was murdered."

Miranda was silent at first, looking out over the view of Omega, at the filth that spread over even the most remote of areas, the neon signs sending an eerie glow that didn't substitute for the lack of sunrise. There was a halo of orange that lit up from behind Miranda and a blue light that fell on her cheeks, making her look all the more steely.

"If you take that information to Udina or Anderson," she began, slow and calculating. "You will lose all credibility. While it is a known phenomenon that human biotics dreamwalk, half the community believe it is just hallucinations that prove the frailty of the human psyche. Not only do you risk losing your job, but every case you ever worked on will be questioned, uprooted and guilty perpetrators might walk free. Find tangible proof or drop it."

Miranda didn't wait, simply walked away and didn't stop as Kaidan called after her, angry.

"Have a little faith in me, will you?" he shouted. "And you're biotic too, damn it! You know it's not just bogus."

That caught his partner's attention, just before she disappeared back into the apartment. She looked at him, deadpan and sharp as ever.

"Knowing is never enough, Kaidan," she said. "We must convince. Which demands _unquestionable_ evidence."

With that she was gone, Kaidan left fuming out in the open air, or well, as open as it ever got inside a space station. There was no sky like there was at least an illusion of at the Citadel, but there were shadows concealing whatever ceiling kept the air in, making the streets seem like they spread underneath an endless night. Underneath that faux sky, Kaidan took a moment to himself, trying to calm down, while not really enjoying the view of Omega, as soothingly familiar as it was.

Miranda was right, of course, he realized. Without proof his word was really little better than a hunch in the eyes of the law and as much as Blasto vids liked to romanticize the idea of investigators' gut feelings, real life was far less spiritual and much more bureaucratic. There might be something coming out of evidence, there was a lot of it after all, but Kaidan didn't want to count on it, especially not when Miranda seemed so set on just quickly wrapping it up. She was influential enough that people would be willing to toss bureaucracy out the window for a shortcut.

Kaidan's thoughts instead came back to the man from Shappi's. He had to find him, he realized. A fellow witness who could confirm what he himself had seen, to preserve Kaidan's sanity if nothing else, affirming or disproving what Kaidan thought himself to know had happened to the Salarian.

Looking in through the windows, Kaidan saw Miranda had already ordered in the stretcher and the body bag, and the forensics team was packing up. For a brief moment, Kaidan and Miranda's eyes met and he tried to find something there that could explain, shed some sort of light on what was going on in her head, but he got nothing but a dismissive glance to the side.

Kaidan waited a little longer, for Miranda to leave, before he returned to the apartment, now sans dead body, only a pool of dark green drying blood and the white markings left to tell it'd ever been there. There were still officers around, registering and packing evidence, but they like Miranda were cutting corners with their work. Kaidan tried to have as proper a look as possible, committing as much as he could to memory, noting that multiple copies of the same business card were scattered around. It had Salarian text on it that Kaidan's built in standard translator chip quickly translated to a name, Ish Silagi, and a drop box address. The card was otherwise blank. Quickly when no one was looking, Kaidan snatched a card and headed out.

\---

Because of work, Kaidan had been unable to check the drop box until hours later and by then, unsurprisingly, yet incredibly disappointingly - it turned out to be a bust. The box had been forced open with a standard crowbar (Kaidan had measured the width of the scrapes and everything, finding nothing distinguishing about them), swept clean and all its surfaces, as well as the surrounding area, had been diligently wiped, leaving no traces of fingerprints, possible DNA samples or similar. While the obvious clean-up could be presented as reason for suspicion, it lacked the indisputable connection necessary for him to be able to overrule Miranda's preliminary report on the case. Especially when it already had Udina's seal of approval on it.

All Kaidan left the drop box site with was empty hands and a ringing headache. He tried to think up a plan B through the haze of the dull, pulsing pain of his migraine, but it all came back to the lonely man from Shappi's. A fellow witness, someone to help identify the murderer. Someone who would at all believe Kaidan. The conclusion was easy to reach - he needed to find the man, which was easier said than done and even turned out to be more difficult than expected.

Not finding the man at the same pub a second night in a row hadn't troubled Kaidan. He'd appreciated it actually as anything else might have indicated the man was an alcoholic, but then he spoke to the bartenders and while they had noted the man there yesterday, neither of them had ever seen him before. In other words, the man was in all likelihood a onetime customer in this establishment and Kaidan had nothing else to go on. In a place as big as Omega, this was a problem.

There were also growing slums outside of the station, drifting old ships strapped together to make larger complexes inhabiting thousands of people each. If the man was indeed a veteran, it wasn't unlikely that he lived in one of those. Veteran pensions were far from impressive these days.

There was the database at work, covering millions of people in the system, both citizens and people without legal status, but with tens of thousands of human veterans, it might not be very efficient anyway, so Kaidan went on a traditional man hunt, covering about thirty pubs a night, so far he didn't get called in for work. After four days Kaidan was part amazed at the amount of dingy bars that thrived in Omega, part overcome with hopelessness at ever finding his fellow witness. On day five he had to take a break to handle another case (one more gang war where innocents got caught in the middle).

They'd arrived very quickly on location, almost catching the Batarian in the act and Kaidan was chasing the suspect through back alleys when he finally came across the man again. In the rush, Kaidan almost missed him, walking with his head down and keeping out of the way from other pedestrians, a worn and dull jacket slumping over his broad shoulders. It was only the scar at his hairline, barely sticking out underneath the hood, that caught Kaidan's attention, nearly causing him to stumble in his dash.

The break in his pace made him fail to dodge a person exiting a back door, giving the Batarian further heads start and making some noise as their two bodies clashed. Kaidan let out a quick sorry, trying to use his biotics to stop the Batarian, but his balance being off warped his aim and he dragged a large crate instead, that unfortunately did nothing to stop the escapee. It did however catch the attention of the man from Shappi's.

He must've noticed Kaidan first, glaucous colored eyes turning first to the O-Sec officer, then taking in the rest of the situation. Without a word he removed his boot, gave himself some momentum then threw the boot after the running Batarian. Kaidan noticed his arm glowing slightly blue in the process and wondered if the man was even aware of it. The boot flew far enough that any professional pitcher would be jealous, hitting the Batarian in the back of the head just before he turned a corner. Kaidan still had to run after him, but the fall had cost him his chance of escape.

After securing the suspect, Kaidan had to await a shuttle to take them away, so he couldn't go back and seek the man from the pub out. Shortly after the man came of his own though, to retrieve his boot.

"I need to talk to you," Kaidan said hastily, feeling weird having this conversation here, with colleagues incoming and the suspect struggling to free themselves under him. The man from the pub looked a little troubled at first, caught off guard, but quickly smoothed those indications off his face, looking simply blank but alert.

"I only meant to help," he replied, but not defensively. He used a tone as if he was ready to accept anything, too tired to fight.

"Not about this," Kaidan clarified, trying to get the Batarian to just lay still. "I'm honestly grateful for your help. It's something else but-"

He was caught off as the Batarian made an especially violent twist, nearly throwing him off and he had to focus to regain control again. He regretted not regularly carrying a stun gun, but to be fair, he normally only handled the dead. Arrest warrants were mostly passed off to someone else, unless time was of the essence as now or when a second murder was about to happen. He seriously considered gearing up better in the future though.

"Can you meet me at Shappi's, you remember the pub where we first met," Kaidan asked, near pleaded. A small smile twitched in the corner of the man's mouth, but it was quickly gone.

"We never actually got to meet there," the man said rather than answering the question. Sirens started sounding in the distance, fast approaching which meant that shuttle was incoming any second now.

"Please," Kaidan said, looking to the man to further convey how important this was. "In two hours."

The man hesitated, something holding him back, clearly mulling something over in his head, but ultimately he conceded. Kaidan let out a sigh of relief, thanking him. A silence stretched, only the increasingly loud sirens filling it.

"I should go," the man suddenly said, abruptly turning and letting himself get swallowed by the dusky backstreets before Kaidan got to realize they still hadn't exchanged names.

\---

The ratty pub was just as ratty as last time, the same type of repetitive soundbites echoing out of the Asari Avatar's mouth, bouncing off people's ears as no one was interested in hearing about the wars, crime rates or political messes. Kaidan heard O-Sec mentioned but failed to catch the context as he was busy searching the patrons of the bar for a human head with a buzz cut and a scar. He found him, in the same depressingly lonely seat as last time, although not quite so many chairs had been stolen away to other tables yet. It was still just the one man though, with his one beer.

Kaidan got himself a beer too, to make it look casual enough, before sitting down. He had two intense eyes on him the entire time, following him all the way like company he hadn't asked for. The man was probably awfully curious on what this was all about.

"Hey," Kaidan said, a bit awkwardly, earning himself a "hey" back. He considered introducing himself with full title and everything, as this was related to an investigation after all, but then he remembered how this was in no way official, how he had no support from the office to do this and figured he might as well go about this casually.

"I'm Kaidan," he said. "Kaidan Alenko."

"Shepard," was all he got back, and a strangely formal handshake, but he took it. The man gave a firm shake then let his hand go, returning to gripping his beer, looking oddly stiff as he sat hunkered over the table. It was like he was imitating a relaxed posture, rather than actually relaxing.

Kaidan grabbed a menu from the center of the table, gesturing with it towards the other man.

"Have you ordered anything to eat?" he asked, figuring he could at least offer to treat the man to a meal in exchange for his time. Shepard shook his head, but didn't take the menu.

"I'm not hungry, thank you," he politely declined, then added, "and I couldn't read the menu anyway."

Kaidan made a surprised face that appeared to be enough to signal he was curious about that, because he got a quick explanation of how Shepard's translator chip got busted in the field. Audio translations still worked, which was lucky for the man as life would've been hard in Omega otherwise, but text other than Earthly English Standard was lost to him.

"Sounds rough enough," Kaidan commented, having entirely forgotten about food, the menu now lying abandoned on the table top. Silence spread briefly, only filling with sound from the holoscreen where the avatar was temporarily replaced. Kaidan reacted to the new voice, realizing it was Udina being interviewed about recently having taken over as head of O-Sec Homicide Division, which was still a thing to get used to. The man came from a background of law school and politics rather than working the field. While not entirely outlandish, as he had worked within O-Sec from behind a desk before, it still wasn't a conventional fit.

Next to him Shepard cleared his throat as if to regain his attention.

"You wanted to talk about something?" he prompted and Kaidan set off, Udina all forgotten, explaining the Salarian murder made to look like suicide, the empty drop box, his predicament with lacking sufficient proof, etc. He kept his voice low, leaning close and to an outsider it probably looked intimate, which allowed them the privacy Kaidan needed in order to speak freely. Parts of what he was saying was actually confidential material, supposed to be kept to a need-to-know basis in respect for the dead. Shepard just sat there, stoic as he took it all in, an occasional nod here and there.

"You want me to testify?" Shepard asked, once Kaidan was done, his eyes searching Kaidan's while giving nothing away as to what his thoughts were on this whole mess. Kaidan worried for a while, worried he might have made the biggest mistake of his life, trusting this information to a stranger with no occupational oath to bind him into loyalty. Nothing about him seemed menacing though and as much as some scoffed at those who believed in instinct, Kaidan wasn't entirely willing to disregard it. There was no sixth sense that some officers had, but experience made you catch things, subconsciously, and interpret them without being able to explain how or why. This Kaidan believed in strongly and all his training and experience told him that at the very least Shepard wouldn't do him any harm. Biggest risk was that he wouldn't care and simply walk away.

"No," Kaidan replied. "Even if there are two of us, it will never hold up as testimony in court. Dreamwalking is exclusive to human biotics, poorly researched and not even perceived as real by many species. I do however need your help to identify the murderer. And any other potentially important details that I might have missed. I need leads to go on, because now I have nothing."

Shepard was silent for a while, mulling that over for a bit. Kaidan took a sip of his beer to keep from fidgeting. He was out of his depths and he was certain it showed, like a neon sign flickering above his head. No one else in the bar paid them any attention though, too busy with their celebrating or their mourning.

"You were there too," Shepard ultimately said, looking down into his glass, half empty, twirling it around slowly. "What makes you think I saw something that you didn't?"

"Two set of eyes always see more than one, in my experience," Kaidan explained, having interviewed enough witnesses to know that looking for that last witness could be crucial. He locked eyes on Shepard again, wanting to try to read him again for what he was about to say. "And something tells that wasn't the first time you've had a rude awakening like that."

Once again silence, contemplation clearly happening behind eyes that shifted ever so slightly while the man's mind probably covered his various options for how to respond. Kaidan had seen this a lot, although most tended to do it far less than Shepard. For some, a murder case was just this weird break in their daily routine, and for all they projected a sense of horror, of shock, they put little thought into what they'd witnessed, instead eager to just matter for a short while, to talk to someone who treated their words as important even though they themselves didn't give them too much consideration. Leaving a witness statement was for many more about personal closure with what they'd seen or even just attention than actually helping the investigation. Kaidan saw nothing wrong in that, but noted that Shepard was different. Veterans often were.

"I didn't realize at the time," Shepard admitted, ultimately. "I didn't even figure they were someone else's dream, but I recognized the sensation instantly. When that happened on tour, it always meant we had enemies in camp. Knowing that saved me. Many times."

There was a story there, potentially several stories, but at the time Kaidan didn't delve as he didn't know Shepard well enough yet to feel privy to such details. This talk that they were having felt excessively intimate as it was, and there was a bigger picture that had brought them here to think about.

"Can you describe the last moment of what we saw for me," Kaidan asked instead, deflecting from the war time memories, and Shepard seemed somewhat relieved, his shoulders easing slightly albeit only temporarily. He set off explaining and mostly it was the same. Some things Kaidan would've described differently, but he could correlate the details to what he himself saw and experienced, and even brought back some clarity to details that had begun fading. Then there was one thing that starkly differed.

"And there was an archive chip, stored in a container, hanging around the Salarian's neck," Shepard said and Kaidan instantly stopped him.

"Wait, what? When did you see that?" Kaidan questioned, brows furrowing in confusion. Neither in the dream nor in the apartment had Kaidan seen anything that could fit the description. Shepard looked up, also frowning as if Kaidan not having noticed was the strange thing.

"I didn't see it," Shepard answered, calmly. "I felt it. It was important so he thought about it as soon as he realized there was danger. People always think about what is important when the fear comes. I usually don't pay it much attention, but I remember this clearly because it struck me as odd to think of a chip."

"What do people normally think about?" Kaidan couldn't help but ask, realizing too late that his curiosity was perhaps a bit morbid. Then again, choosing to work as a homicide investigator probably was too.

Shepard just looked sad, dejected, but he answered.

"Usually things we regret," he said solemnly. "Like people we wanted to see, things we regret saying or not saying. Dreams unfulfilled. Things like that."

Kaidan wondered what he would've thought about, but clamped down on that train fast, focusing on the present. The archive chip. This was a lead as much as the view of the murderer they'd both gotten. It was also unhelpful in actually getting the case anywhere.

"So we can assume the murderer is human female, and the motive is something related to this archive chip," he commented, more to himself than to Shepard. "Not much to go on."

He reached into his pocket, taking out the business card he'd kept closely on him since that day in the victim's apartment. Since then they had confirmed the identity as Ish Silagi, matching the name on the card, which wasn't surprising, and Udina had accepted Miranda's report, ruling it suicide without question. Up until this case, Kaidan would've too, which made it all the worse. Miranda had claimed his dream would've unraveled every case they had closed, but now he was questioning them all himself because of her. Still, he wasn't willing to give up, not yet.

"What are you going to do?" Shepard asked, carefully, sounding almost as if he hadn't been sure he should've asked. Kaidan tapped the card against the table, thinking back on the drop box. It had been cleaned out for a reason, he was sure of that much, and there had to be some way to find out.

"I'm not sure," he replied, aiming for ease he didn't have. "I'll think of something. Are you sure I can't get you anything?"

Shepard looked hesitant, almost troubled, and Kaidan hurried to have a look at the menu for him, before the man outright declined a second time.

"Let's see here, levo-protein section...," Kaidan muttered as he searched the tablet. Most of the dishes were either Asari or Batarian, but he only bothered with dishes that sounded at least vaguely human. "There's some sort of fried fish, there's fries... some sort of burger... uh-oh, that last one has _Krogan flavouring_."

"Fries," Shepard interrupted him. "If you insist."

A tiny smile tugged at the corner of the Shepard's mouth, one that didn't instantly straighten out, so Kaidan saw that as a win. The smile only faded when Kaidan ordered one serving of fries and nothing for himself. The change was subtle, or would've been if Shepard's smiles weren't so rare (or Kaidan was less attuned to them). Before it even registered as a conscious thought in his head, Kaidan had stopped the server and requested a second serving of fries, even though he didn't particularly like them. Shepard didn't comment, but there was a slope in his shoulders that was actually somewhat loose and a look of pleasant surprise twinkling in his eyes.

"Hey," Kaidan  said, feeling silly in the silence. "If I need to speak to you again, about the dream or the case, I can't rely on stumbling upon you in some backstreet."

He activated his omnitool, expecting Shepard to do the same so they could quickly connect them, but Shepard pulled an old fashioned pen out of the inner pocket of his jacket instead, then reached for Ish's business card still in Kaidan's hand.

"You don't have an omnitool?" Kaidan asked, baffled as omni-tools were near necessary these days to be part of regular society. Shepard didn't answer at first, simply wrote down a couple of lines of Earth English at the back of the card before pushing it back across the table. The address answered Kaidan's question in part, giving directions towards the Quarian built slums, floating in orbit around Omega, disconnected from any official infrastructure.

"It was confiscated upon my honorable discharge," Shepard further explained, opening a multitude of new queries.

"Long story," Shepard admitted, looking lonely again.

"We've got time," Kaidan said in invitation. Shepard looked hesitant at first, almost distrusting, but then slowly, he started opening up about small things. There were details left out, important details, Kaidan could tell because he was trained and experienced in looking for the blanks, but for once he didn't have to care, could simply appreciated the things that Shepard indeed did trust him with.

By the time their food arrived, they already had a steady conversation going. Looking away from Shepard for the first time in a good few minutes, Kaidan by chance noticed a stranger staring at them, hard and intent. It caught Kaidan off guard enough that Shepard had to step in and accept his plate for him. As the plate hit the table, he turned around and quickly apologized. The next time he looked towards the stranger, the man was gone without a trace. As Shepard continued talking, he pushed it out of mind, returning his attention to the company, the food and the for once decent tasting beer.

\---

The hour was late by the time Kaidan made it homewards and he had an early morning shift to look forward to. If he was lucky, no one would bother him until then, but a sense of dread clutched at his gut, which translated into expectation that he'd be called in earlier than the start of the shift. No one called, but the dread increased and reformed as he got close to his apartment. The narrow balcony leading up to the long row of even narrower doors was quiet and empty, the lights flickering as bad as ever. Noise from the nearest commercial district lay as a background track to the loud shouts of his arguing neighbors, voices muffled through the door, and the air was warm and humid. All this was as any other day, but what differed was the slight gap in his own door.

As he got closer, Kaidan saw that the lock was flickering worse than the street lamps, the mechanism probably having been shocked into yielding. There were sparks spraying out every now and then, joining the drips of water escaping faulty plumbing, extinguished as they hit wet surfaces. Kaidan was now glad he'd picked up both gun and stun gun before heading out to see Shepard. He contemplated briefly between the two weapons, ultimately going for the stun gun, weighing the pros of having a live suspect to question very heavy.

Taking a couple of deep, calming breaths, he entered his home on high alert. After quickly sweeping every little nook and corner with his eyes, stun gun in front of him and at the ready the whole time, he found that the burglar was already gone. In the filtered light from the street, he could see the air was a bit clouded and that his belongings were in shambles, but little else. When he flipped the light switch, the scene got impossibly worse. Whoever had been there was not a mere burglar. While the place looked completely upturned, it wasn't exactly. Things weren't merely thrown around. There were long, charred cuts all around the place; in furniture, in walls, in books and most notably his bed. The cause of the destruction had even been left behind, place dead center in the mattress. It looked more or less exactly the same as the sword left in chest of the Salarian victim.

Kaidan tried not to panic, tried to think. He sunk into a crouch while his eyes swept over the room rapidly, back and forth, without really taking it in. His mind moved about as fast and as erratic until he finally got his thoughts in order again. As much as it was his home, this was just another crime scene and thus he began with calling it in.

Traynor answered at the office, at first professional, but then unable to prevent a more personal _"oh my god, are you okay?"_ from slipping out. She requested all Kaidan's details that she didn't already know by heart, filing all the observations that he could make on the spot as well as sending a specialist team over. They reached the point of the call where they'd normally hang up and get back to work, but they kept the line in silence for a while.

"What now?" Traynor then asked, concern in her voice. "I mean, you can't very well spend the night at your place, can you?"

Making these sort of arrangements usually fell to the officer on location, which normally wasn't the same as the victim or target. The usual policy was to help them get to some relative or friend, alternatively drop them off at a hotel unless there was a threat to their life in which case they'd be sent to a safe house. Under any other circumstances, Kaidan would've gone with the safe house without hesitation, trusting his colleagues, but things had changed.

"Yeah," Traynor said at the other end of the line, before Kaidan could answer, but it wasn't directed at him. He could hear the faint murmur of someone else in the background, but it was too quiet to distinguish who. While the conversation played out, he fished Ish's business card out of his pocket, flipping it around to view the back - view Shepard's lazy handwriting.

"Miranda says she has a guest room," Traynor suddenly returned to him, then hissed under her breath. "How the heck does she afford a place with a guest room with our salaries?"

"Says you who spent an entire month's salary on a toothbrush," Kaidan teased, referring to the controversial purchase his colleague had made a couple of years previously. It was one of those jokes that had stuck around even after it had been entirely exhausted, growing into something nearly nostalgic at this point.

"Hey, that was a onetime expenditure and I will be laughing when you all whine about your dentist bills," she defended her precious, infamously pricey toothbrush, as she always would.

Kaidan kept eyes fixed on the card, tracing the letters and digits in the address lines as Traynor kept singing praises to her dental investments.

"Whatever makes you happy, Samantha," he commented, catching how distracted he sounded too late. Re-pocketing the card, he quickly spoke again. "By the way, tell Miranda I'll be there in an hour, tops two."

Expectedly Traynor made mock assumptions based on that, teased him a little even though they both knew that while Kaidan and Miranda worked well together, there wasn't really any love lost between them. Soon enough Traynor disconnected the call, leaving Kaidan roughly a quarter of an hour before O-Sec colleagues arrived to secure the scene. Rather than taking account of all the things that had been destroyed, from expensive gismos he'd saved up to get, to little pieces of family heirlooms, as emotionally important as they were unimpressive, he tried to distract himself with making a personal set of scans of the site. They were poor at best, his omni-tool not being purposed for the job, but it was something to look through before everything was properly processed.

Once the other officers arrived and they too had made their records, he got to pack a duffel with cleared essentials like spare clothing and hygiene products. He didn't make it to Miranda on the expected hour mark, but he made it within the two hour limit. It was well past midnight by then and his partner merely let him in before disappearing back into her bedroom. The guest bed wasn't made, but there were fresh sheets and he quickly got himself settled. Normally he didn't sleep well in strange places, but after such a tiring day, he was soon out like a light.

When he started dreamwalking, he kept an eye out for Shepard. A couple of times he thought he saw him, only for the figure to disappear like a mirage. Every time there was an almost painful yearning that followed. Kaidan suspected it was significant, but muddled with sleep he couldn't figure out why, so he merely kept walking the dreams, wherever they'd take him.

\---

Miranda's place was huge compared to his own, but not obscenely so. Maintenance and rent probably wasn't too awful, but it must've taken a considerable up payment to secure it. Other than the size and a few items in Miranda's wardrobe, there wasn't much trace of that money she supposedly came from. The interior was actually rather humble, and unusually sparse compared to your average Omega apartment that tended to make compact living into an art form. Miranda's furniture was simple, practical and relatively far apart. There was no clutter anywhere, save on her living room table that hosted multiple tablets and documents, relating to numerous cases, if Kaidan knew her right. The only things to decorate the walls were various diplomas, a picture of Miranda's sister (Miranda was very private, but Kaidan was privileged enough in his partner's life to have been let in on the importance of that one relative) and a large group photo, labeled as Eden Security, dating from before Miranda's time in O-Sec.

As he dressed, Kaidan walked up to it. Finding Miranda didn't take too long. She was a woman who early on had known her style, her sense of self, and thus she hadn't changed much in the seven years since the photo was taken. She even had the same serious, near grim face that she mostly made in after work night photos as well, all the while the rest of them were smiling and cheering. It wasn't that Miranda couldn't have fun. She just wore that face as soon as cameras came out, which was often enough that Kaidan and the others found it amusing by now.

Then Kaidan recognized another face. At first he couldn't place it, only knew it made him feel cold and sweaty at once, dread pumping out in his veins like ice and back like fire. As he stepped closer, he noticed the photo featured several signatures. Furthermore, everyone in the picture was human. Every single one, which was surprising considering the background indicated this photo had been taken at the Citadel. The signature beneath the disconcertingly familiar face read Eva Coré wich was in no way helpful to place her.  

Miranda came into the hallway, stopping right outside the guest room as she pulled on her leather gloves. Kaidan was just about to ask her about the group photo when both their omni-tools pinged. Their eyes met and Kaidan tried to not let the dismay he was feeling show on the surface and Miranda merely quirked a brow. Kaidan, not trusting his voice at the moment, gestured for her to take it. Turning back to the photo, briefly, he finally connected where he'd seen Eva Coré's face and why it had him so on edge - Ish's dream.

"We are days behind on paperwork," she protested out in the hall, walking away and towards the front door. Kaidan took a moment to collect himself and his things before following. "I bet you fifty credits it's a _lover's spat gone too far_ -kind of murder. Don't waste our time... Yeah, fine, but only until Ashley arrives. Then we're going back to the office. You know we have to file our case against the Batarian within fourteen hours or we have to release him back onto the streets again... _Exactly_. Thank you, sir."

As the call ended, Miranda turned to Kaidan who kept his focus on the shoes he was putting on, not ready to face her yet as his mind was still mulling over this woman Eva Coré, and if her connection to Miranda was in any manner significant. 

"We got some Asari banker found dead by the highly suspicious girlfriend," Miranda summarized, throwing on a tailored coat. She released the lock on the door that slid open with a silent woosh, then turned around, casting a pointed look at Kaidan's bag. "You alright?"

"I don't want to impose," Kaidan explained, aiming for a casual tone and probably missing by a mile. It was a minor mercy when Miranda merely shrugged as she replied.

"You said it, not me."

They travelled in silence for a while and ultimately Kaidan couldn't stand being alone with his thoughts.

"Where did you work before O-Sec?" he asked. He kept his gaze ahead of him, but unable to catch any details through the windshield of the fast moving shuttle. His eyes darted rhythmically back and forth, catching on obscure things that disappeared just as quickly as they'd appeared.

Miranda groaned.

"Is this about the apartment?" she asked, bored, as though she'd had this conversations multiple times before. Maybe she had.

"It's a simple question," Kaidan placated, earning himself a quick glare and a sigh.

"Well here's a simple answer," Miranda offered, biting. "Omega is a poor piece of junk. Work anywhere in Council space and you can afford the down payment on a place like mine in six months or less. It's hardly rocket science. There's no grand inheritance, no rich daddy that spoils me and no fucking history of dancing at Purgatory, for fuck's sake."

It wasn't what Kaidan had wanted to know, but he had to wonder one thing.

"If you had work in Council space, then why did you come here?"

Miranda fell silent, looking away and out. The shuttle was slowing down, descending upon the tarmac, close to their crime scene where a couple of uniformed officers were already moving about.

"I was looking for someone," said Miranda and hopped out before Kaidan got to ask who.

\---

"Do you have any clue who she could've been looking for?" Kaidan asked as he waited for Traynor to bring up the detailed scans of both the sword from his apartment and the one stuck in Ish's body. Kaidan was convinced it was the same make of sword, but without the scans he couldn't confirm his theory. The data from his own apartment wouldn't have been analyzed yet and thus not available from his own station, but Traynor ought to be able to access the raw data for him. He was impatient enough to work with that.

Traynor scoffed.

"Why are you asking _me_? She's _your_ partner."

"She's evasive and you know all the office gossip," Kaidan explained, and Traynor's look said she did not appreciate that description of her. "Also, you had a thing for her when she first started here, didn't you?"

Traynor stopped doing what she was doing at her station in favor of indulging in a bit of healthy banter back and forth that mostly centered around the difference between having interest in a person's butt and having interest in the person as a person. Traynor was apparently not above objectifying her colleagues a bit in secret and Kaidan was more exasperated than he was surprised.

"Anyhow," Traynor rounded off.  "In conclusion... we have company!"

Traynor looked over his shoulder and as Kaidan turned, none other than Miranda herself came sauntering down the stairs. Traynor cleared her throat in an unsubtle hint and Kaidan rolled his eyes, shaking his head slightly, which Traynor apparently took as queue to ask for him.

"Say Miranda," she said in a tone that was as ridiculous as it was transparent. Miranda didn't even deign to level her gaze, instead kept reading at the pad she was carrying. "I never see you with anyone. Is there some... unrequited love story there? Someone here in Omega?"

"For the sixth time, I'm straight, Samantha," Miranda replied deadpan, hitting the bottom of the stairs. "Udina wants to see you, Kaidan."

With that she walked away, the click of her heels sharp against the hard floor. Traynor made an ieek-sort of face and returned to tap away on her terminal.

"I'll go see Udina, then get back to you," Kaidan said, getting a thumbs up for that suggestion, then headed for his superior's office. The quickest way there was through the office landscape where his fellow investigators on the homicide section sat. More than half of them were out and the rest worked away with their heads down. Kaidan caught a couple of them glancing up at him though, only to quickly avert their eyes when they met with his. For someone who'd been working there for well over three years and who was diplomatic enough to get along with most of them, this was strange. That strangeness sat like a weight plastered on his back as he waited for Udina to respond to his knock. The landscape was eerily quiet, no one talking in the room, and only the gentle tapping at terminals filling the silence.

"Come in," words finally came muffled through the door and Kaidan thought he'd never felt happy before to step into the man's office. The sense of relief was short-lived however as Udina cast him a sympathetic smile. It was incredibly false, of course, pasted on for show in what looked like a terrible parody of Jack Harper's infamous poker face, floating all across the city in the holovid ads.

"Why don't you sit down," Udina suggested, which further unsettled Kaidan.

"Will this be long?" he asked, trying to think of what he could've done lately that would warrant a serious talk. As far as he knew, he had acted in accordance to conduct at every turn throughout all of his career.

"It was merely an offer," Udina dismissed, almost sounding offended, but leaning back in his chair, making himself more comfortable. "I heard you had a bad night last night. Are you well?"

Temporarily calmed, not feeling as though he was about to be examined on the quality of his work anymore, Kaidan gave a brief and impersonal assurance, doing his best to keep it professional and appropriately short. Udina smiled another fake, tight smile.

"I'm glad to hear, but as a cautionary procedure, I have filed you for ten days leave," he said, instantly raising a placating and silencing hand once Kaidan started protesting. "It is paid leave, Alenko, because I value the work you do. You are homeless for the time being anyway, so why not take a vacation? I hear Lorek is quite fascinating this time of the year."

"I can't be gone for ten days," Kaidan protested, not believing what he was hearing. The previous unease was boiling up into outright anger. Had he been a more impulsive person, he might have punched something, but instead he stood there, breathing fast and fuming. "Cautionary procedure, sir? That attack on my apartment wasn't random. Someone tried to threaten me because I was on to something with the Ish Salagi case. I swear it was the exact same make of sword that was left in my apartment."

"What sword?" Udina asked, not inquiring, but rejecting. Kaidan felt his blood draining as though someone had punctured his gut and it was all flushing out fast, leaving him dry and cold. Udina merely continued his pandering as though he hadn't ripped the carpet from underneath Kaidan's feet. Kaidan only picked up the occasional word, but still somehow had the presence of mind to make the right affirmative noises. There was a distant ringing and it took him too long to realize the ringing was only in his head.

Udina was advising him again to go for a holiday, see his mom or some friends. This time Kaidan nodded, silently.

"Yeah, I'll go... see a friend," he promised, not knowing what friend he meant, having so few of them outside of work, but Udina seemed happy enough with that, dismissing him.

Back in the office landscape, the looks that had before seemed odd now felt downright menacing. Kaidan had seen the sword in his apartment bagged and numbered by fellow officers before he left, so someone had removed the sword out of O-Sec hands. A small optimistic voice in his head said it might be a mistake on Udina's part, that he hadn't read the report properly. The man was neither physically tough nor a tech wiz, but he was still a man who'd earned his position through hard work and attention to details. He could be down with the worst flue of the decade and still wouldn't have missed such a crucial detail as the blade. It had been the centerpiece of the crime scene for crying out loud. Even someone only marginally as skilled wouldn't have missed that.

As Kaidan descended back into the basement, his fears were confirmed by the look on Traynor's face that probably mirrored his own in paleness. Her skin was ghostly and her lips pulled tight and thin.

"They're missing," she hissed under her breath as soon as Kaidan came close and Kaidan gave her an equally quiet "I know," before she had the chance to explain just how much worse it all was.

"Both the swords! And everything else from the Ish Silagi case. There's nothing there!"

A door closed in some other end of the floor and Traynor visibly jumped, then let out a shuddering breath of distress and frustration. While she had many years of service at O-Sec, she rarely saw much action from down in the archive and it was easy to tell how poorly she was handling the stress.

"Can we go somewhere where we won't be disturbed?" Kaidan requested, for both their sakes.

"Yeah, and I need to show you something," Traynor said, and lead them away past the store rooms. They walked through a narrow concrete corridor, lined with doors on both sides, opening to rooms filled with rows upon rows with shelves.

"I checked them all, nothing," Traynor commented in passing, gesturing a hand about towards any and all of the rooms. Towards the end of the passage the lamps were flickering, more often off than on and there were a couple of heavily fortified doors with multiple rows of locks, some even mechanical. There was a fingerprint scanner and Traynor brought out a box, containing a silicone thumb prosthetic.

"This is not as bad as it looks," she uttered defensively as she held the prosthetic to the scanner, name of the head of the organized crime unit, David Anderson, appearing on the screen. "Me and the lab guys got together to make a birthday prank, celebrating Anderson turning the big fifty and all, and we made this to get into his office. Aaaand I sort of kept it. Never used it until now though!"

He probably should have, but under the current circumstances, Kaidan couldn't complain and rather kept quiet as Traynor tapped in a code, then unlocked the mechanical locks with an actual, old-fashioned key.

"Normally I have to request temporary access to get in here, but this was all so weird I just had to look it up."

They stepped into the room and the door slid shut with a dull and heavy bang. The room was poorly lit, despite all the lighting already being turned on and there was a terminal in the corner that looked far older than any of the models used in the rest of the office.

"There's no surveillance in here?" Kaidan asked, to make sure, before he spoke freely. Traynor pointed out a big bulky thing in one of the corners and while it had a lens, it looked nothing like any surveillance equipment Kaidan had ever seen.

"Only that one and it stopped working long before I started working here, so we're safe," she assured, tapping away at the terminal, entering codes that Kaidan was entirely unfamiliar with.

"Someone's bought Udina," he said, crossing his arms and tapping his elbow nervously with right index finger. "He just forced me on ten days leave. And I have my suspicions about Miranda too."

"Miranda?!" Traynor exclaimed, for some reason less surprised about Udina. Then again, nobody liked him, at least not at the office, so maybe it was less difficult to see an enemy in him than in someone you regularly shared drinks with. Also, Traynor if anyone knew how long and well him and Miranda had worked together, accumulating one of the highest arrest to conviction-rates on all the station, excluding the traffic department.

"The way she dismissed Ish Silagi potentially having been murdered," Kaidan explained as long lists with the odd blanks here and there appeared on the screen of the terminal. "And, I _know_ who the murderer is, I just can't prove it yet. This woman, I'm pretty sure she and Miranda are at least acquainted. It's too much of a coincidence."

"Shit," Traynor offered breathlessly, letting a pause hang in the air between them before bringing attention to the terminal and the blanks in the lists.

"Here's what I wanted to show you," she said, but the lists were just random code that Kaidan couldn't make sense of. Traynor continued. "Let me explain. So I made your query earlier, and first when I couldn't find the sword, I thought it might not have been processed yet, and wasn't too concerned, right? Then I checked the Silagi case and that's when things got weird. Even though there was _heaps_ of stuff in that batch, a good portion of it would've been processed by now so _none of it_ appearing just made no sense. Mistakes happen, like you file things under the wrong case number etcetera but there are base codes for specific items that are automatic and like... I tried _everything_ , still hitting nothing. There's some helpful rigidity to the system however. Like you can never register the same case number twice. Even if you file evidence from one case on two separate case numbers by mistake, you can't clear the second case number to fill another. This means if you delete a case, it will leave a blank in the system. There are more reasons for blanks however, like every tenth or so case number will never be used as any archivist logged in will have a case number locked and booked to their account. This is a precaution so we can continue to work even in event a terminal goes temporarily offline, without the added risk of two cases accidentally getting logged on the same case number. But when we log out, going on a break or quitting for the day, that booked number becomes forfeit, so I had a few hundred numbers to go through, hence I went here. This terminal doesn't log any evidence data, but it logs log space. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it is a failsafe so that no terminal ever gets overloaded, which can corrupt data. Basically it registers every article registered as an appropriate section of space and when a terminal reaches a certain limit, it will begin locking the terminal down to be long term stored. As no data is ever supposed to be removed, this terminal won't release space even when data is removed. In other words, even a permanent purge will leave a trace in this system. So a forfeit case number will leave a gap like this."

Traynor pointed out to a specific section of the screen, where there was a line, starting with a code and a case number, but then lacking the last sections of data that followed on the line above and below it. Then Traynor moved the lists to a separate section of the list that looked different. It started out like the forfeit case number, but at the end of the line there was data size listed and furthermore, this wasn't just one single line. There were multiple pages of half empty lines.

"This is the Ish Silagi case," she explained, grimly. "There are one-thousand-three-hundred-and-eighty-two pieces of evidence that were registered, but then purged. Which is illegal. Even articles registered by mistake are not allowed to be deleted from the system. You tag it as incorrect filing and then don't touch it. As Omega has a period of prescription of fifty years, no data whatsoever can legally be purged before the fifty year mark. Whoever deleted this data must not only have been aware of this, but also had the tech skills to override all the locks in the system."

It was Kaidan's turn to say "shit."

"Udina couldn't have done it," Traynor said after some heavy silence where only the electronic hum of the ancient terminal had filled the air. "Not himself at least. He lacks the skills. Miranda could, but..."

"But we don't know," Kaidan concluded, feeling heavy, exhausted, as though he'd run a marathon only to be told he had run the wrong way and now had twice the distance to go. No, actually, this was so far much worse that it couldn't even compare. He could run a marathon under the crushing gravity of Thunawanuro, along the planet's equator with an Elcor on his back and still feel more spirited than this.

"There are two options," he finally said, eyes locked on the terminal. From the corner of his eye he could tell Traynor was looking at him, expectantly, the light from the screen reflecting in the whites of her eyes, making them seem bigger than they actually were. "Back away, pretend we never saw any of this, and just drop it. For good. Or... we solve the Ish Silagi case, because therein lies the key."

Silence returned, until Traynor spoke quietly, but determined.

"I won't back away."

"Neither will I," Kaidan echoed her sentiment, relieved to have a comrade in this mess. He had lost his partner, lost his superior, but he still had a friend which counted for more than he'd ever expected.

They strategized for a bit, keeping it brief as they didn't dare to keep Traynor away from her assigned terminal for much longer. They needed to stay apart, make it seem like Traynor was absolutely clueless and that the two of them had little or no contact. Kaidan would go underground, investigate privately and through brokers while Traynor would keep her eyes open for more evidence disappearing, and anything else at the station that could be reason for suspicion. It wasn't perfect, didn't inspire much hope in ever solving this mess, but it was a start.

"Where will you go?" Traynor asked at last, before they left the sealed log terminal room. Kaidan took out his wallet, fished out Ish's business card and flipped it around to look at the back. Shepard's handwriting was now slightly smudged, but still readable.

"Somewhere unexpected."

\---

The Quarian slums weren't exactly ugly. They were creative in ways that told stories of long traditions as well as incredible craftsmanship, but it also told stories of extreme poverty. It was all essentially junk, repurposed, some pieces more than once. There were bits of ships so old that Kaidan doubted even his grandparents' generation had ever travelled in them.

For being called the Quarian slums, only a very small portion of the inhabitants were actually Quarians. Quarians built and expanded the slums though, as part of their pilgrimage and unlike everyone else there, they moved on with time. The humans and all the other aliens, however, were there because they had no place else to turn. At least it wasn't as miserable as the Vorcha slums that were too lethal for anyone but the Vorcha.

The instructions Shepard had written on Ish's card had seemed vague, but after wandering around confused for an hour, Kaidan started seeing a pattern that actually made sense, suddenly making it so much easier to find his way. He ended up in front of a door, sealed with an intricate mechanical lock that was a handiwork in of itself. The door it was placed in looked incredibly bulky in comparison, Asari make and an antique by now. The body of the apartment was some sort of shuttle, but Kaidan couldn't trace its origin. At some point it had been painted over, but was now flaking and rusting.

He looked for something like a door phone or bell, but then figured that this being the slums, perhaps there weren't such things. All he could find was the neat little sign with punched in letters spelling out _SHEPARD_ and a metal weight that hung from a chain near the door. He grabbed the ball, inspecting it only to find it blank. As he let it go, it swung back against the wall and sent a resounding bang all through the shuttle hull. Well, whether or not that was the purpose of the ball, whoever was inside would now be aware there was someone outside.

The door didn't open, but the noise attracted the curiosity of a Volus next door. The little creature breathed a few raspy breaths through its suit as she stared at Kaidan.

"You looking for the human veteran?" she asked when Kaidan didn't say anything, listening to the following couple of breaths that were more labored than the previous ones. Not that Kaian was an expert on Volus respiratory systems, but in his experience it normally wasn't quite that poor.

"I'm looking for Shepard, yes," Kaidan admitted, nodding his head towards the name tag. The Volus breathed a few breaths before replying, as though she was gathering strength to talk.

"He's out," she said and disappeared again.

Kaidan stood there awkwardly for a while, looking around for any other sign of life in this section of the slums, but it was rather dead at the moment. There weren't even vermin like in Omega, only loads of echoes vibrating through the metal skeleton that held together the whole construction. While half of those sounds were so low in pitch his ears barely registered them, they were occasionally loud and he could only imagine how much damage they did to your ears after a decade living here. He was struggling to not pity Shepard for being stuck in such a place.

Time passed slowly, and after about ten minutes Kaidan figured there was nothing else to do but wait and thus sat down in front of Shepard's door. He considered playing around with his omni-tool, but changed his mind before switching it on, not wanting to risk it pinging his location to anyone at O-Sec. So he took out a pad instead and started reviewing what little data he had saved from before the archive wipe. It was less than an hour of reading, which he'd already read through twice, but he told himself there might be something he'd missed, that there was a point to reading again and again. After all, there was little else he could do.

By the time Shepard arrived, he'd actually fallen asleep.

\---

If Shepard's door had been bare and lacking in what Kaidan knew as the minimum, basic comforts, it was nothing compared to the inside of his apartment. Kaidan's place was small, but his bathroom was bigger than Shepard's total living space. In part this was because the place had no bathroom, instead relying on communal toilets and showers, located a ten minute walk away and shared with about a hundred other humans. When sick, people just kept a bucket in their room, Shepard explained and Kaidan had to wonder at how a simple stomach bug hadn't wiped out the entire slum yet. He also noted that there was an emergency bucket stashed under the sink, now holding an amount of trash that was about as meager as the rest of Shepard's belongings.

As mentioned, there was a sink, which was really just a large bowl underneath a water container hanging from the ceiling and with a tap-like construction mounted to the mouth. The bowl/sink was then placed on a table that also held an electric hotplate, attached to an old battery. On the opposite side there was a bed, sort of, a sturdy board really attached to wall and the beddings rolled and strapped aside, allowing the board to be used as a table during the day. There was a stool, next to the bed, probably doubling as a night stand at night. On the floor, that was pretty much it. There were a few boxes and bags hung up on hooks in the ceiling, but that was really the end of it.

"I'm sorry I shouldn't have come here," Kaidan burst out as he took it all in, realizing he'd grossly underestimated the extremes of poverty. O-Sec jurisdiction didn't cover the slums and thus he'd never been this far out. To even consider asking to stay in this place was probably not only poorly conceived but most likely also very inconsiderate. He'd never felt so privileged and like such a clumsy intruder in all of his life.

Shepard was awfully magnanimous about it all though.

"I'm sorry it isn't much, but I'm glad you came," he said, standing there awkwardly in the door as Kaidan was filling out pretty much the rest of the floor space in the room. If the veteran man hadn't stood in his way, Kaidan would've been tempted to flee the scene in embarrassment. "I thought I'd never see you again when you walked out of Shappi's and I had a few things I was wondering about."

Kaidan knew he hadn't shown his most pleasant of sides that night, but first now did he realize quite how badly like a jerk he'd acted, so focused on Ish and the case.

"If you sit on the cot, we can both fit inside," Shepard continued. Kaidan hurriedly obliged, feeling it was the least he could do, then awkwardly tried to figure out what to do with his bag. Shepard helped him out, taking the bag and hanging it up on an empty hook on the wall before seating himself next to Kaidan. Graciously he then offered Kaidan to go first about his issues.

"Please," he protested, turning his head to the right, taking in Shepard who was closer than he'd ever been before. The cut at his hairline had healed fairly well, though the scar tissue was still fresh and red. His eyes were as blue as ever, locked and focused, barely blinking as he looked earnestly at Kaidan. This close Kaidan could see there were laugh lines, but they weren't as deep as the worry lines and wasn't that a sad sight. Kaidan bet Shepard looked great when he laughed. "I've imposed enough. The very least I can do is let you go first."

After a moment's pause, Shepard did.

"I was wondering about biotics, how to control them," he admitted, looking at his hands. Unlike in the dream, he didn't just activate the shield and Kaidan realized that perhaps he couldn't.

"Biotics is a bit like breathing," he started, as best as he could. It had been so long since he'd undergone his own training that he no longer remembered how his instructors had broken down the theory to him. "Your body will do it for you, regulate it after your physical needs, but you can consciously control it if you want to. It feels a little like your pulse, only it starts at your spine rather than in your chest. Can you feel it?"

Shepard closed his eyes for a minute, then asked:

"Does it feel like static?"

"Yes," Kaidan agreed, watching as there was a faint glow collecting in Shepard's open palms. It didn't last, but it was a first step. "Hold on to that sense."

Shepard tried for a few more minutes before his posture slumped and he let out a heavy sigh. By then he'd managed to get an uneven field to surface, fade and resurface at irregular intervals from all parts of his body, even if not all over at the same time.

"I feel exhausted already," the man admitted, sounding disappointed.

Kaidan assured him it was perfectly normal, especially in the beginning and you didn't know how to be efficient with your energy. That efficiency as well as stamina would increase with time, but it took a lot of practice. Shepard seemed at least a little mollified by that, relaxing even further which got him tipping slightly in Kaidan's direction.

"I should go," Kaidan said then, shifting uncomfortably where he sat crammed into the corner, feeling in the way for the man who probably needed his sleep now. Shepard studied him though, contemplating something before he spoke.

"You brought a bag and you came to me," he observed, carefully looking at the duffel that still hung on the hook on the wall. "That means you were out of options."

It was strikingly true and Kaidan was beginning to learn just how remarkably observant the man was. Maybe it was a veteran thing, a survival skill, or perhaps just something that was uniquely Shepard. Either way, Kaidan felt defeated.

"I'm sorry," he said. Sorry for intruding. Sorry for making Shepard a last resort rather than a friend to trust. Once again, Shepard was gracious about every slight that Kaidan threw at him.

"It's fine. You can stay," Shepard said, then quirked a quick smile. "If you don't mind sharing and can handle that I'm twitchy in my sleep."

"I've been informed I snore, so we're even," Kaidan said, while feeling they weren't even at all by a long shot. He owed Shepard a lot by now. That feeling of limitless gratitude persisted as they both crawled under the covers and Shepard indeed began twitching. Kaidan wasn't asleep until several hours later.

\---

Kaidan had arrested a couple of brokers, but he'd never hired one. The one he was approaching now, Barla Von, was one who skillfully balanced on the edge of the law well enough that while O-Sec had kept an eye on the Volus, they'd never brought him in. While contacting a broker that wasn't being kept on the radar might have been wiser, Kaidan honestly had no other clue of who else to turn to. This side of the law was entirely strange to him.

Barla Von's office was a temporary thing near Omega's export docks, guarded by a big and burly Krogan that glared but said nothing as Kaidan approached. He wondered if he were to address the guard before entering, but decided that the door being open ought to be invitation enough.

The inside of the office saw a couple of terminals that reflected what a nomadic life Barla Von had, still being stacked in boxed with merely the top half lifted off and set to the side as makeshift tables. It wasn't pretty, wires laid out all across the room, but Kaidan had to admit the solution was at least neat.

"You're O-Sec," the Volus greeted him, not unfriendly, but hardly jolly either. "You either bring something dumb or something really complicated."

"I hope I'll make the exception to that rule," Kaidan offered in return, stepping a little closer but keeping a respectful distance to the terminals. He suspected he really didn't want to see what was on those screens.

"You state your business, I'll offer a rate and if you can pay half up front, we got a deal."

Having no real frame of reference, Kaidan had no choice but to accept those terms, and proceeded to request the Volus provide him a dossier on Eva Coré. The Volus looked unimpressed, as much as one could mostly hidden behind a mask.

"That is too unspecific. It could be a ten credits job or it could be a ten thousand credits job."

Kaidan was definitely coming off as an amateur, and he suspected he'd already gotten himself placed within the _dumb_ section of Barla Von's O-Sec customers. He tried to think of how to limit the search, of what things he himself would be searching for specifically in a typical O-Sec-style dossier.

"Okay, two things then," he said. "What's her connection with Miranda Lawson, and, are there any connections, however vague, between Coré and Ish Silagi."

At the mention of Ish Silagi, the Volus froze in place. He stood like that for a moment, then turned towards the Krogan at the door.

"Lock up and don't allow anyone even coming close," he yelled and with an affirmative grunt, the Krogan closed the door. There was a series of clicks and then a scraping sound that Kaidan realized was something heavy being pushed in front of the door. There were a couple of windows in the room, showcasing a view of docking storage space, but Barla Von pressed a button and screens came up and covered them.

"Be very careful with a name like that," Barla Von then said, hissing like static through his mask. "Only fools mention the names of fools. Do you have a death wish?"

"I take it he was someone big," Kaidan said, not even pretending he understood the significance of the broker's reaction. Barla Von hissed again, or maybe that was a growl. It was hard to tell through the mask.

"You are dangerously clueless," muttered the Volus, all the while rerouting his terminal, plugging wires to go through a separate box that Kaidan could only guess the purpose of. "And I think I know who you are now. There are talks about you, inspector Alenko."

Kaidan tried to not visibly flinch or jump when the Volus got his name right, feeling terribly unnerved at what kind of talk could be circulating in the underground for the broker to know him and in connection to Ish at that. It made him wonder who had messed up his apartment, if it really had been Coré or just an impersonator.

"Lucky for you, you've caught the interest of the Shadow Broker, so I'm inclined to help you off charge just this once. But once this is over, I never want to see you again, just so we're clear."

Kaidan had heard the mention of the Shadow Broker before, it was impossible not to. Working on the homicide team however, the person was seldom of importance to his cases. As an O-Sec officer he probably should try finding out more about the mysterious broker, but he didn't want to push his luck with Barla Von's generosity. Kaidan was not one to bite a hand willing to feed him, especially after his own hands had been cut, figuratively speaking.

Barla Von, once the rewiring was done, started writing a lot and fast at his terminal, pausing only occasionally with a stillness that was eerie. This went on for an extended period of time and as Kaidan had no way of telling the time without turning his omni-tool on, it felt like ages passing in the stifling, hot air.

"I've found a connection," Barla Von ultimately announced, stepping back, his tiny round chest heaving a few heavy breaths that rasped through the mask. "Cerberus, a large parent company. All of them, the three you mentioned, have at one point or another worked for companies owned by the mega-corporation Cerberus. Eva Coré even seems to have shares in a few shell companies under the Cerberus umbrella, as well as previous employment in Eden Security, same time as miss Lawson. As for Ish, while he seems to have gone to work on a daily basis at Augeas Galactic, the only employment document I can come across ties him to CB Financial, which seems to be little more than a dummy company that legally can't employ people. In other words - Ish was never officially employed. Whether he was aware of it or not, he was moonlighting."

Kaidan wanted to ask how the Volus had found all this, but refrained, figuring the less he knew the better. While he needed to find proof, Barla Von's proof wasn't all too likely to be proof that he as an O-Sec officer could make use of. Instead he asked:

"What kind of company is Augeas Galactic?"

"Law firm, corporate clients only," Barla Von said. "Got a lot of Citadel clients."

Considering the kind of warning the little investigating he'd done on his own so far had warranted, Kaidan assumed checking out this firm would be positively lethal. Still, anything else didn't seem like an option. He had to get to the bottom of this.

The broker observed him quietly, probably getting what sort of conclusion he was arriving at.

"Well," he said, sounding somewhat defeated. "That's about all I am willing to do for you. It was great knowing you, human."

Kaidan swallowed, feeling the words like nails in his coffin. He nodded and backed towards the door.

The Volus raised a cane that he banged in a sequence against the wall, which was followed by returning, scraping sounds outside the door. Once it went silent, the door swung open, revealing the Krogan who held it open. Looking back over his shoulder, Kaidan got his last ever view of Barla Von.

\---

"I'm going to do something, and I don't know what's going to happen," Kaidan admitted as he was back in Shepard's tiny space. The two of them were sitting on the bed again, close side by side, but still feeling very far apart. Kaidan thought of how they'd first met, or almost met, unburdened by this mess and with hope for something else, something to fill a void that had walked at his heels for far too long. He looked to the scar that had been a wound, wondering if they were being sealed together like the healing skin, or shut out as the naked flesh was no longer bared. They both had their secrets, he thought, touching the reddened line with the pad of his thumb.

"Will you tell me what happened?" he asked, voice only just above a whisper, more breath than sound. Shepard still heard him, opening the eyes he'd closed to watch intently.

"I fell," Shepard said, a little sad, eyelids falling shut again as Kaidan gently kept caressing the scar and the surrounding hairline. Feeling encouraged by the way Shepard leaned into his touch, Kaidan added his other hand and started massaging the other man's scalp. 

"In an elevator shaft."

Kaidan halted for a second there, mind connecting the dots, but failing to come up with a complete picture. 

"You got there before they got the security tapes up?" He asked, remembering that the cut had been fresh when they'd first met, the very day after the most recent sabotage upon the commuter elevators. 

Shepard looked pained at the memory.

"I got there before the area needed to be secured," he said cryptically. It took a little longer, a little more for Kaidan to understand. "It seemed like a good way to go. Free falling and then nothing. And at the bottom of the shaft, no one would need to clean up that much, if there would be much at all to clean up. I didn't want to inconvenience anyone."

As Shepard spoke, Kaidan let his hands drop down to the man's shoulders, massaging strokes turning to firm squeezes. If he was trying to ground Shepard or himself he couldn't tell, but there was a cold and twisted fear clenching in his gut, even though he had Shepard sitting here in front of him now, alive, despite his words. Shepard just continued, as though he wasn't aware of the physical contact anymore, as though it was just him and the words he needed to say.

"I said people think of regrets when they die," he continued. "And I know this from personal experience. I had squeezed through the door, and stepped off the ledge, feeling calm. Feeling it was right. But it was such a long way down, much longer than I'd ever expected. Taking the elevator always felt so fast, but as I was falling it was as though I had time to do that extra thinking I hadn't done before. I thought I deserved death, until I then realized that it was an escape I hadn't earned, and how terribly cruel it was to everyone I'd failed to save on Akuze. What right did I have to escape the guilt? What right did I have to make that choice that had been taken from all of them? So I panicked and the world turned blue. I guess that was my biotics?" 

Shepard opened his eyes, turning them to Kaidan, uncertain, in question. 

Staring into the pair of blues, Kaidan extended his thumbs, stroking them over the warm skin behind Shepard's ears. He reached one thumb forward, over the artery in the man's neck. The pulse was surprisingly calm, steady. Kaidan felt as though his own chest was a disproportional mess, heart beating fast and erratic. He took a calming breath and tried to answer Shepard's question. 

"I guess it was," he said, disbelieving but seeing no other possible explanation. Hell, it even made sense, from an evidence point of view, but the  _magnitude_... "A biotic pull could in theory make an elevator shaft distort like that, but... the force must've been  _tremendous_." 

Neither knew what to say to that and there was a potent pause spreading between them, electric with so many different emotions that it left Kaidan's head spinning. When Shepard swallowed, his eyes automatically fell down to the man's throat, watching the Adams apple bob with the movement.

"That first night at Shappi's," Shepard whispered between them, quietly, yet the words filled the room like thunder. "Was it just me or...?"

"Yes," Kaidan answered right away, with fervor, pushing forward and only stopping himself the last moment when Shepard rocked a little in surprise at the move.

"I know this is fast," Shepard continued, all the while his hands found their way into Kaidan's clothes, gripping the fabric hard as if undecided between clinging to them and ripping them off. Shepard was breathless as he continued. "I know it's too fast, but it's been so long and you... I..."

This time Kaidan closed the distance and Shepard met him halfway. It was indeed too fast, in every aspect, but Kaidan couldn't regret a thing when they lay there sated and naked underneath the worn out blankets roughly half an hour later. He'd honestly forgotten what it was like being that close to someone and if he indeed was walking into his death with this case, he was glad of having known it once more.

Shepard lay next to him, looking at him, expectant and observant as ever, reading his every move in a way that Kaidan was getting shamelessly used to in such a short time. When he reached for his jacket, extracting the now slightly worn business card he'd taken from Ish's apartment, Shepard's gaze was with his hand all the way there and back. Before Kaidan got to ask, Shepard had reached for a pen for him.

"Thanks," Kaidan muttered, feeling a bit sleepy, as he took the pen, but Shepard didn't let go.

"Don't go," the man pleaded and Kaidan couldn't answer, couldn't phrase the urgency he needed to convey, because there was no way that he could stay, not now. He wanted to give in though, to indeed stay and never leave this bed, even though it was the hardest surface he'd ever slept on, cold if it wasn't for the shared body heat. He didn't want to leave Shepard behind and now he realized that this maybe had been a mistake after all, as much as he didn't regret it at all.

After a few seconds Shepard conceded to the silence, accepting and miserable, relinquishing the pen as he dropped back down onto the cot.

Kaidan hurriedly wrote down two lines of numbers and letters. When done, he held up the card and pointed to the first line.

"That's my omni-tool ID," he said, even though Shepard wasn't looking at him, instead staring grimly up into the ceiling. Kaidan shifted his finger to the second line. "And that's my personal identification code. If you need to find me."

Shepard's jaw tensed and he made a move as if to roll over to face the wall, but then he stopped himself. He took a deep breath before looking up at Kaidan.

"If you do something stupid and die," he said with both vehemence and worry in equal measures until his voice trailed off, unable to finish.

"I'll try not to," Kaidan offered, honestly, while getting dressed. Shepard huffed at that, clearly mad, slipping into pants and sweater much faster than Kaidan, storming away before he could be stopped. Left in the empty room, kept dressing as slowly as he could, hoping the other man came back before he had to leave, but to no avail. Before stepping out, Kaidan made sure that Ish's card laid clearly visible on the stool next to the cot, before slipping out and towards the slum shuttle stop.

\---

Augeas Galactic looked clean, or as clean as you could plausibly expect from Omega. The stone décor at the entrance indicated an imported wealth and legacy that leant credibility to a company such as this. Standing across the street, looking in, Kaidan kept to the shadows for now, hiding himself in a cheap parka he had appropriated from Shepard earlier. Various other people mulled about, most of them in passing, but behind glass doors all seemed calm and quiet. At the front desk sat a human, long hair pulled back into a neat, tight bun and clothes some sleek and expensive suit. Occasionally you could spot some employee or other in the background, moving around with purpose, but never with haste. The whole office seemed like a bubble, picture perfect and only mildly out of place, the complacency enough to make you never look twice.

Then Kaidan sought his way around to the back. Behind the office complex was a secluded corner, perhaps not meant for, but definitely used for quick smoking breaks. There stood a bunch of aliens, three Salarian and one Drell, huddled close together and talking in hushed voices while passing a cigarette between them. They all wore badges with the Augeas Galactic company name and logo. For the first time in a couple of days, Kaidan extracted his badge.

"O-Sec. Can I ask you a few questions?"

The four of them froze, exchanging quick glances until one of the Salarians, the one currently holding the cigarette, stepped forward. She had her arms crossed and while her head was tipped back a little haughtily. The rest of her posture looked defensive rather than cocky.

"Augeas Galactic prides itself in high customer confidentiality. Unless you can produce a warrant, employees cannot and will not answer any questions pertaining to our work here at the firm."

The words sounded practiced, as though they'd been drilled into every employee, but there was a loop hole that Kaidan gladly took advantage of.

"It's not regarding the firm's business, but rather one of your former colleagues," he explained, watching them communicate silently and frantically through pointed glances. "Can you tell me anything about Ish Silagi?"

The pointed glances escalated into harsh whispers, hurriedly exchanged with a sense of desperate urgency. Kaidan waited them out, only hoping he had the time. It felt like the shadows were creeping up on him, any moment about to give birth to Eva Coré and her electric sword. Then the Drell spoke.

"We were just talking about his disappearance," he said, squirming a bit on the spot and nervously looking towards the firm's back door, as if checking that no one was spying on them. "He'd been restless for a couple of days. Then one morning he didn't come and we were informed he'd been let go."

"So you aren't aware he's dead?" Kaidan asked. The Drell and two of the Salarians looked distraught, but the third one just looked resigned.

"The thought had struck me," he said, shaking his head. "That it was possible. Not a word for days, just silence. One of few logical explanations. Poor Ish."

While the Salarian woman said:

"He was murdered, wasn't he?"

Kaidan reacted to this.

"What makes you say that?"

The four of them looked between each other, silently communicating again.

"He acted as though he was haunted," she ultimately explained. "Before he disappeared. Like he knew. Talked once of a testament."

"It could've been suicide," Kaidan tested even though he didn't believe it for a second. It appeared to be a shared sentiment because the Salarians all three scoffed, one of them muttering "humans."

"Suicide is an alien concept to Salarians," they explained. "Self-sacrifice for a greater good perhaps, but suicide? No. We do not process depression and anxiety the way you do. It is simply ludicrous to even imply that Ish would commit suicide, even if he was mentally ill, which he was not. Stressed perhaps, but definitely not anything heavier than that. Death would only have happened at another's hands. If accident or illness can be ruled out, the only logical conclusion is murder."

All the aliens made affirmative noises or gestures at this. It wasn't proof, but it felt like winds in the sails after weeks on a still sea, no land in sight. Kaidan felt this near painful hope that he was getting somewhere, had a chance at solving this. Which was why perhaps his attention to the surroundings started getting sloppy.

"Have there been any more disappearances, aside from Ish?" he asked, just in case there was a pattern that could help explain, bring more chance of recovering evidence and the answer was shocking.

"Oh yes," they said, almost laughing, in a way that was in no way happy but rather exasperated and sad. "Multiple."

"And all aliens," the Drell pointed out, with approval from the other three. Kaidan activated his omni-tool to take notes.

"Give me names and dates," he requested. The list he got was long, dating years back. This, he realized, was much bigger than anticipated. He remembered Barla Von, calling Ish's name dangerous. Too late would he realize that all these names were equally dangerous.

He called up Traynor on her private line, feeling excited and harried at once, walking away from the firm where he'd thanked the Drell and Salarian trio for their cooperation. Traynor answered soon enough, voice hushed, as though he hadn't managed to catch her alone.

"I need you to check all the names I'm sending you, and I need you to check them now," he explained, sending the list with a quick code to the omni-tool. In the next few steps he noticed there was an additional foot fall that didn't come from his own two feet and in the last instant, he turned and was able to protect himself with the arm equipped with the omni-tool. An electric blade descended on him, shattering the omni-tool, shocking his entire left arm numb as the tool fell apart. He quickly covered himself in a biotic shield, which was wavering and unsteady due to the numbness in his arm. The shield only bought him enough time to notice his attacker was none other than Eva Coré herself, before she slammed the handle of her sword into his temple, sending him unconscious with another electric shock.

\---

After Kaidan's departure, Shepard had gone back to the apartment to despair. Despair at Kaidan's foolish bravery. Despair at his own cowardice. He had tried going back to his usual routines, pretend he hadn't just let another good man walk off to his death. He'd been stuck in the dullness of his routines for so long, only making by as the shell of a being he was ever since his discharge, so it shouldn't have been hard to do the list of chores. Yet, he got caught in little things, like questioning why at every other step.

After about half an hour he simply stopped and just stood staring. Unbidden, his eyes fell onto Ish's card at the stool next to his bed. He picked it up, studying Kaidan's hand writing next to his own, finding them vastly different even though they were written in the exact same pen. Flipping it over, he noted the Salarian text that he couldn't read with his malfunctioning translator chip. Heck, hadn't it been for the logo on it, he wouldn't have been able to tell if he looked at it upside down or not. Until he could. Holding the card with the logo at the bottom rather than the top, he noted that within the Salarian letters were numbers. Not human, but Prothean, and what a strange coincidence that odd knowledge ever came to use. Looking them over a few times, a piece fell into place and his eyes widened in understanding. Hurriedly he grabbed a coat and dashed out, not even bothering to lock.

\---

Waking up Kaidan thought it was the morning after an especially wild party. His head hurt, his mouth was dry and he was in an unfamiliar apartment. The lights were on and someone was moving about in the background. He groaned as he realized his arms had both fallen asleep and tried flexing his fingers. It wasn't until he realized his legs were somehow bound that he understood that something was amiss. He tried to lean forward, to look down and see what kept the feet from moving, but found he couldn't. That was when panic started to rise, and someone turned on the TV.

The generic voice of the Asari avatar started narrating the news, until the channel switched, jumping through channels and programs until landing on a rather obnoxious game show, filled with roars of laughter. The volume was raised, but Kaidan couldn't discern a single spoken word above the roaring of his pulse in his ears. That's when Eva Coré came into view.

The woman looked different, different from the photo in Miranda's apartment that had showcased a smiling woman in security staff gear, different from the woman in Ish's dream who'd been a force washing towards you, eyes focused through combat glasses. This woman wore a sleek suit that was stylish, yet inconspicuous, had her hair swept back in a neat French twist at the back of her head and a posture that was relaxed, yet confident. As she looked over her shoulder, pinning Kaidan with her gaze, it was still unmistakably Eva Coré.

She said nothing. Kaidan wanted her to say something, anything, even a promise of death, whatever that could let Kaidan prepare. Now he sat with a million questions and no way to make a plan, being bombarded by commercial laughter so loud that it would drown even screams.

Ouh.

As if Coré had been waiting for him to reach that conclusion, she opened a drawer and extracted a syringe and needle. Then the woman stopped, touching right index- and long finger to an ear piece. Her lips moved, briefly, before she returned to preparing whatever drug she had intended for Kaidan.

Kaidan tried to break free, at first with subtle movements that would go unnoticed, but then with vehemence as he realized time was running out. He tried screaming, but could barely hear himself over the holoscreen, and soon Coré reached him, silencing him with a backhanded slap. It was hard and fast and left him momentarily stunned, even though it did no further damage. What it did was give Coré enough time to jam the needle into Kaidan's thigh, where she depressed the plunger, forcing something cold into the muscle tissue of Kaidan's left quadriceps. Kaidan tried to squirm away, even if it would cause the needle to rip through his muscle, but it was to no avail. The whole syringe was emptied into him, and he felt hyperaware of every little change, trying to predict the purpose of the drug.

Coré stepped away, taking her sweet time depositing the needle into the trash and exchanging the syringe for gloves. Meanwhile Kaidan felt himself grow tired, sluggish and slow. At first he fought hard to stay awake, only to realize that wasn't the problem. More than sleepy, his mind was slow and any complex thoughts became hard. Like he'd been trying to think of a way to get out of his bonds, but now it was a challenge to even register what kind of bonds he was in.

Coré lowered the volume a little, not much, but enough that it would be possible to talk to someone who was close enough. She then returned to Kaidan's side, leaning close to Kaidan's ear to ask questions.

Kaidan could hear all the individual words, but he couldn't make sense of them together. He was too overwhelmed with nausea to think.

"I feel sick," he said, and something released around his shoulders before a hand forcefully pushed him until he sat doubled over. Between his feet there was a bucket already, like Coré had predicted this and within seconds Kaidan's stomach emptied itself. He was then quickly yanked back up again, which sent the room spinning in his vision, and the restrains on his shoulders were back.

"At Augeas Galactic, who were you talking to?" Coré repeated her question. When Kaidan only answered with silence at first, the woman grabbed him hard by the hair, pulling his head back into an angle where the acid in his mouth poured back towards his throat, stinging. He couldn't help but let out a pained and broken groan.

"Through the omni-tool, you were talking to someone. Who?" Coré demanded with greater force and a harsh tug for emphasis that left Kaidan's scalp stinging. He told himself he wasn't going to answer, but before he knew it his mouth was talking anyway. He wasn't aware of what exactly he was saying, but he was describing Traynor, Traynor as a friend, as a colleague and after a moment, Coré let go of the grip on his hair.

"Why were you at Augeas Galactic?" Coré asked, her voice not as close anymore. Kaidan looked around, trying to find where she went and after some searching found her approaching a large cabinet.

"You killed Ish," Kaidan replied, suddenly feeling weirdly amused at saying that out loud. He knew, in a detached sort of way, what was happening now, and he thought of Shepard saying you thought of your regrets in that moment of fear. Kaidan wasn't afraid yet, not even as the cabinet opened to a collection of weapons, but he did regret. There was no worded thought to explain exactly what he regretted, but he thought of Shepard, of blue eyes, a cut at the hairline and careful smiles. He thought of something that had been there between them all along, potent but unexplored, something more than a single occurrence of sex. He thought so much that he didn't even notice Coré choosing a heavy pistol or the game show being hijacked by Aria. He barely registered the Asari's passionate speech incriminating Jack Harper, something about him operating under the alias _the Illusive Man_ and a secret network called Cerberus. About huge profits made on weapons deals after rigging multiple military losses, such as Akuze. Even though Coré was trashing the room in rage and calling someone in fear, Kaidan barely noticed.

He instead thought he saw Shepard, dashing into the room, into Eva Coré, biotics alight. Only, the force was too stable, too masterfully controlled and then he realized the person had long hair that swayed like a flag in the wind when dodging and countering Coré's attacks. Kaidan realized it was in fact Miranda who'd come to his rescue, just as Coré's fired into her shoulder and the enraged woman sent her flying into the holoprojector with a kick to her chest.

Then a lot happened at once. Eva Coré suddenly fell lifeless to the ground as a whole crowd of people rushed into the room, shouting commands all around. Miranda was hauled up from the floor and carried out. A couple of officers came up to Kaidan to release his bonds. He couldn't help but cry out in pain as blood rushed back into his hands. A third person came up to him, a medic, just before he passed out. 

\---

Kaidan lay in water, his body bobbing up and down just beneath the surface, his face breaking up for air only occasionally. It struck him as strange that he wasn't panicking at this, that the water felt soothing even as it was preventing him from breathing. The sky above, whenever he caught sight of it, looked dark and smattered with stars, only broken up by the early rays of a sunrise. The stars were getting blurred however, by the water and perhaps by something else. Kaidan felt incredibly sleepy.

Then hands grabbed at him, getting firm grips at his shoulders, pulling at his clothes for a while before reaching underneath his arms. He was pulled backwards and up, helping him breathe. It felt good to be carried somewhere, to have someone to trust and to care for him, even if he had no clue of who this person was. The stars above him were clearing.

They hit a beach and Kaidan was dragged ashore, noting that the white sand was littered with dead fish. Further down the shore stood a Salarian, probably the dreamer, and Kaidan wondered why it was always dead fish with Salarians.

His rescuer kept pulling him further and further up the beach until only his feet were occasionally washed by the waves, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand with each sweep. Hands then touched his neck, his face and shaking his shoulders. A man came into view and the familiar pools of blue looked terribly worried. Kaidan tried to raise a hand to touch him, to soothe, but found he had no strength.

"You have to wake up," Shepard said, firm yet shaken. "Please wake up for me."

Kaidan tried to say something cheeky, something like "since you asked so nicely," but perhaps the drug was still in effect because what came out was instead:

"I'm tired."

Kaidan's eyelids felt heavy, and it was a struggle to keep his eyes open. He still caught Shepard shaking, his jaw clenched, before the man pulled him up into a near bruising embrace.

"Come back to me," Shepard whispered into his ear, and yeah, Kaidan found that he could do that. With great effort he managed to raise a hand up to touch Shepard's back and before him the sea dissolved.

\---

"People of Omega, this is Aria and I bring word to you. The liars, the cheaters and the murdering scum that have hurt you will now be brought to justice."

Kaidan woke to these words. A moment of silence followed, then it started up again, a few words mid-sentence and then more silence. It went on like that for a while, until the sound played out without pause again.

"We have over five thousand top secret contracts drafted between Cerberus and Alliance Officers from the last year alone, covering everything from weapons deals to human trafficking, surviving soldiers being whiskered away to be experimented on."

Kaidan slowly blinked his eyes open to a white hospital room. On the wall in front of him there was a screen, showing Aria as she spoke to the people. The image then cut to surveillance footage in a lab room where a man was tied to a bed. Next to the tied man stood a couple of scientists, an elder man and a woman. Aria continued.

"This is Corporal Toombs, the second survivor of Akuze. Never heard of him? That is because he discovered that the thresher maw attack was a set up to convince the Alliance to buy Cerberus company Terra Firma Corps new bombs, that had been deemed too uncontrollable in scope and long-term effects on the environment to be ethical to use. Corporal Toombs was kidnapped, experimented on and ultimately murdered to protect this dirty secret."

The screen paused with the male scientist in the center, then zoomed in on the man's face.

"That's my father." It wasn't Aria that spoke now and the sound came from Kaidan's right, rather than from the screen. He turned and there sat Miranda in a bed next to his, her shoulder bandaged and a bruise on her forehead. She looked tired and unkept in a way he'd never seen her before. "I came to Omega because I knew what he was doing, only I couldn't prove it yet. I'd received a tip that he was using Omega to acquire test subjects, so... I came here to investigate it privately. It took longer than intended so I got the O-Sec job to get by. Then I finally hit a break five months ago when I was approached by Jack Harper who could provide me with photos, documents, _proof_. I knew he had to be shady, but I swear, I had no idea it was this bad."

Miranda was now looking at him, and Kaidan met her eyes. There was honesty there, an honesty he knew he could trust because no one could fake looking that remorseful, especially not Miranda. She was too straightforward to bother with putting up an act. He could appreciate that side of her now, as they sat there, both a little broken after everything. Considering what had happened, how it had played down, Kaidan had no idea what would happen, if they'd ever work together again, but he felt placated enough that he wouldn't mind if one day again they did. He offered her a smile to signal as much. She just looked more distraught.

"When Harper asked me to delete records I decided to involve Udina, who encouraged me to play along for the bigger picture, and I listened."

While Kaidan had suspected her, he was still honestly shocked to hear she'd actually been the one to delete the records. Bending the law was one thing, but this was a serious offence. As if knowing what he was thinking, Miranda continued.

"I didn't delete them entirely, merely extracted them out of the system and temporarily displaced the evidence. It was lots of extra work, but I am so glad I did now. Shit."

She fell silent for a while and Kaidan didn't have words to say yet, still trying to understand everything, what it meant exactly between them.

"If I'd trusted you instead, we could've solved it all, all those cases the legal way, before Aria got her hands on the chip and blasting all that information out across the whole damn galaxy. My father has got to be so deep underground by now it will take years to find him again."

Finally Kaidan knew what to say.

"How did Aria get the chip?" he asked, feeling like that was the biggest part missing for him at this stage. Miranda groaned at this, some of the heavy air somewhat broken, the atmosphere just a fraction closer to what it would've been before all this, on a normal day.

"Your shabby pub-flirt is a total geek," she informed, falling back into the bed and turning off the screen as though it offended her. Having been zoomed in on her father, it might just have. Kaidan tried desperately not to blush at Miranda's description of who assumed had to be Shepard. "His translator is broken and the only writing other than Earth English that he's learned is, for whatever reason, Prothean. Something about an Asari archaeologist he rescued once, bla bla. Anyway, Ish's card, Prothean writing was hidden within the letters of the name and the drop box address, giving coordinates to a dead man's box where the contents of the chip had been exported upon Ish's death. So all this time, we had the proof right under our very noses and it took a technically deficient veteran to find it. And his great idea was to take it to Aria. He's occupied the waiting room by the way for the last five hours, so you probably ought to get out there and talk some sense into him."

Kaidan removed the blankets, intending to take her advice on that, and realized how warm he had to be because the room felt freezing without the beddings covering him. Furthermore his skin felt slightly numb. It was probably an aftereffect of the drug that ought to scare him a bit, but his mind was too preoccupied at the moment. There was however one thing that registered in his head as he reached the door. He stopped and turned around, looking at Miranda who had rolled over so her back was facing him, resting on her good shoulder.

"How did you find me?" he asked, but didn't receive an answer right away. He was almost about to give up when he finally got one.

"Traynor panicked, alerted half the office and then Aria came onto every damn screen across the station. I made a guess on three possible locations where I'd previously met with Harper, split us up and just happened to send myself to the right one. Lucky me. Got a ruined shoulder as thanks. You're welcome, by the way."

"Thank you," Kaidan offered, genuinely grateful for her fast thinking, earning himself a dismissive wave. He couldn't help but huff a laugh before stepping out in the hallway. He didn't make it far until he heard the scraping sound of a stool being pushed and within seconds there were blue eyes peaking around the corner.

"Hey," Shepard said, the casual word sounding like a request - a little hesitant, a little daring. Kaidan moved, wobbling as he felt a bit dizzy still. After a few steps his bearings leveled and he had to stop and outright stare. Shepard didn't look the best he'd ever seen him, heck you could even argue he looked like crap with dark circle under his eyes and stubble nearing the length of his buzz cut. Kaidan's breath still stuck in his throat at the sight of him and his mouth felt dry.

"Hi," he said in turn, feeling stupid for finding nothing better to say, like "thank you" or "you're the most brilliant person I ever met" or "when I thought I was dying I mourned not knowing what the two of us could become." Shepard had to catch something he liked in there though, because he smiled, cocked his head to the side in thought, then stepped closer until they stood almost toe to toe.

"I used to think I was defined by my past," he said, somewhat cryptic even though Kaidan now knew what he was referring to. When he didn't continue, Kaidan had to ask.

"And now?"

The smile widened in laughter and perhaps it was a good thing Kaidan hadn't known until then that there was such a smile because the mere memory of it would make him weak in the knees for weeks after.

"Turns out my past wasn't as fixed a thing as I thought," Shepard remarked, tongue in cheek in a way that suited him even better than the buzzcut. Kaidan hated Miranda's dad, Jack _'the Illusive Man'_ Harper, Cerberus or whatever for ever having taken that from the man. "I used to think that everyone I touched died, directly or indirectly because of me, but tonight proved me wrong. I apparently saved, rather than killed Toombs Akuze and now here you are, alive."

"Yeah," Kaidan breathed out, utterly unintelligent, too mesmerized by this new side of Shepard, by being alive still to see him at all, to come up with something wiser to say. Suddenly Shepard got all flustered, which was even more glorious, color spreading across his otherwise moderately pale cheeks. When Shepard seemed to grapple for words for too long, Kaidan couldn't help but to in amusement ask him: "What?"

"I'm trying to say this in a way that won't make me sound like a total perv. I don't necessarily mean it in a sexual way," Shepard explained, stepping close and keeping his voice low so no one else would hear. The added proximity made Kaidan certain he could feel the body heat of the other man's skin, even though they weren't yet touching, but that could be a withdrawal symptom of the drug.

Shepard steeled himself, and spoke:

"Now that I feel like I'm allowed to touch again," he started, managing to sound both embarrassed and grim. Kaidan stopped having a laugh at his discomfort, waiting for what followed in all seriousness. "Now that I dare touch, I feel like I want to touch you all the time."

"Shepard," Kaidan said, but then let his actions speak for him, pulling the other man into his arms, holding him in as tight an embrace he could muster with his weak limbs and Shepard held him even tighter in return, digging his nose into Kaidan's neck and drawing a deep, slightly shaky breath.

"You can call me John."

Getting Shepard's first name was like a barrier falling, and no matter what lay ahead for them, and no matter how ridiculously common that name was for such an uncommon man, Kaidan knew he would always treasure that name.

"John," he said, with reverence. "John..."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are much appreciated and I have some ideas for a sequel that might happen if there is interest for one...
> 
> Trigger warnings: Suicide attempt, discussion of depression and suicide attempt, minor character death and there is a scene which features a non-consensual drug injection.


End file.
